Content warning: minor spoilers for Season 7 Episode 1 of Game of Thrones.

Talk about “Same Shit, Different Day”. In the Season 7 opener of Game of Thrones, poor Sam learns the hard way—in a stomach-turning montage—that manure is serious business in Westeros. This is just as it was in the Middle Ages, and, interestingly, continues to be to this very day.

A medieval chamber pot, held at the Yorkshire Museum. ref.1992.69

Just as it does in hospitals and nursing homes today, care of the sick and elderly in the Middle Ages involved bedpans. And just like twenty-first century bedpans, medieval bedpans needed to be emptied and cleaned, as we see Sam doing over and over. At least Sam doesn’t appear to also be on diaper duty as well, as medieval wife Margery Kempe was during her husband’s long illness. Lucky Sam.

Without widespread indoor plumbing, handling the necessaries is a constant challenge, and not just in the Middle Ages or in medievalesque places like Westeros. Many homes in some US cities were not connected to city sewers until the 1950s and ‘60s; some parts of rural America (like rural Alaska) still do not have indoor plumbing. Whether in medieval England, Westeros, 1930s Philadelphia, or 2017 outside Chicken, Alaska, wherever chamber pots and outhouses are a reality, somebody’s going to have to empty and clean them out.

But where to put all this crap?

While Sam might not see it that way, since the Citadel doesn’t quite offer deluxe accommodations, he’s got it relatively easy. Why?: he can dump the bedpans into a toilet. Toilets have not changed very much over the centuries, though the plumbing attached to them certainly has.

The earliest surviving wooden toilet seat dates back about two thousand years and was found at a Roman military installation in northern England. While the Roman toilet seat looks a lot like what Sam had to work with, the Roman toilet flushed using a rainwater system. If Sam were to have walked a bit further, he might have found public privies like those mentioned in Lincoln in the Canterbury Tales. Similar public toilets existed in most medieval Englishcities, some constructed directly over rivers, others over open cesspits. These could be lethal—literally. Toilet seats occasionally rotted and broke, leading to a rather ignoble end, as happened to Richard le Rakiere in 1326.

People longed for private flushing toilets in the Middle Ages. Some Londoners got quite creative in rigging up indoor plumbing. This included one Alice Wade, who was forced to dismantle her home-made flush toilet in 1314 when neighbors complained to the city that her scheme had blocked a gutter.

If Sam were in a large medieval city, an alternative might have been for Sam to walk the pans outside, or to an open window, and dump them into the drainage ditch running down city streets. But one had to be careful about dumping chamber pots—they could definitely annoy one’s neighbor, as Maud Frembaud did in 1369. Even the Tower of London placed its royal privy on the side secluded from public view: no one wanted to see that.

A man relieving himself, from an unknown medieval manuscript.

Even though medieval people did not fully understand the disease vector presented by all this excrement, they understood it to be a public nuisance and made efforts to rid themselves of it. Rather than allow such sewers to stagnate, medieval city officials made every effort to flush ditches with channeled rainwater and through carefully controlled local streams, including some of London’s “hidden rivers.”

By the late Middle Ages, London and other English cities had a range of city officials in charge of waste removal to protect citizens’ health and safety. Medieval waste gutters, and even twentieth-century sewers in cities, often emptied into rivers. This raised the risk of contaminated drinking water. The very well-paid waste officials in London and other, smaller, medieval cities worked together with a host of entrepreneurs to clean the streets, gutters, and cesspits that ran around and under public toilets. These workers carted the collected human and animal waste of the city outside the walls where manure and other rubbish could be sorted by type and dumped on mandated piles. From here, manure could be used for a range of purposes: as fertilizer, fuel, an ingredient in making saltpeter, or other things. (Though it was not safe fertilizer unless it was properly processed.)

Sam’s labors in service towards becoming a Maester seem almost monastic. But even he doesn’t consider it work in service to the gods; some medieval people did. Margery Kempe cleaned up after her husband strong in the belief that her service brought her closer to God. Saints, such as St. Catherine of Siena, who took physical care of the sick and dying were revered for cleaning sores and bedpans with (miraculously) glad hearts. Medieval culture even made special room in its spiritual hierarchy for those whose jobs were dirty but necessary for a healthy society, whether that job was muck carter or plowman. As one early textbook young noblemen like Sam, “the plow feeds us all.”

Manure, including human “nightsoil,” remains a grave threat to public health today. Most of twenty-first century America has forgotten the horrors of typhoid and cholera, but there is an ongoing epidemic in Yemen, and one very recently in Haiti. Veterans of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are also well aware of these dangers; believe it or not, the best practices in handling military latrine waste remains a hotly debated topic. And the looming threat of climate change could even pose a threat; with water tables rising and funding for infrastructure falling, wastewater treatment in the US is threatened. Let’s hope we don’t all end up like Sam, scrubbing shit during endless extreme weather.

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Part XXVI in our ongoing series on Race, Racism and the Middle Ages, by Helen Young. You can find the rest of the special series here.

This promotional image of the ensemble cast of the first season of HBO’s Game of Thrones features only one actor of color: Jason Momoa who played Khal Drogo.

Game of Thrones doesn’t just have a “diversity problem,” it has a racism problem. The casting and the lack of well-developed characters of colour that attract most critical attention are the visible tip of the iceberg of racism that lies under the surface of the show. That iceberg doesn’t just reflect the race problems of modern-day America, it reflects white privilege and a racist Eurocentric way of thinking about the world that goes back to the Middle Ages.

The tip of the racism-berg is important, and it’s a good place to start. Game of Thrones doesn’t even pass what Manohla Dargis called the “DuVernay test” (modelled on the Bechdel test). The Bechdel test offers a simple way to gauge whether women are represented as full and complete characters; the DuVernay test (named after Selma director Ava DuVernay) does the same for characters from racial minorities.

Although they didn’t call it “the DuVernay test,” Nadia and Leila Latif outlined what such a test might look like in an article for The Guardian during the #OscarsSoWhite controversy:

Are there two named characters of colour? Do they have dialogue? Are they not romantically involved with one another? Do they have any dialogue that isn’t comforting or supporting a white character? Is one of them definitely not magic?

Missandei and Grey Worm, two remaining significant characters of color in Game of Thrones. They are also in (something of a) relationship, and the vast majority of their dialogue is about Daenerys.

After six seasons, Game of Thrones has yet to pass. Missandei and Grey Worm, the only remaining notable characters of color (who were called “really deep characters” by casting director Nina Gold recently), are not “deep” enough to cause the series to cross the basic threshold that the Latifs offered. And change does not seem to be coming; they didn’t have so much as a line between them in the first episode of season 7.

Grey Worm, Missandei—and before them Khal Drogo—are some of the most developed characters of colour in the show. But they exist as bit-players in the story of Daenerys Targaryen, the (possibly) last member of a family that Nina Gold, the Game of Thrones casting director, described as “in the books [they are] these white, white people.”

Daenerys’ travels in Essos are the main vehicle for characters of colour to be included in either the show or the books (the Dornish story arc is the other, and it has its own problems). The problem is that her narrative is essentially a “white saviour” plot, a common trope where a white outsider saves a community of colour from some sort of terrible plight, gaining prestige, power, and self-awareness in the process; think the movies Lawrence of Arabia, Dances with Wolves, and Avatar.

Although Daenerys’ problems governing in Slavers’ bay have been taken as a subversion of the white saviour plot, by the end of season six she had established at least a gesture towards resolution and sailed for Westeros with her dragons and army. It’s here that the structural racism—the part of the ice-berg that’s under water—comes in. Everything that Daenerys has done in Essos is in the service of her goal: claiming the throne in Westeros. The people of color of Essos become her army—a tool to be used in achieving her ends.

Guy of Warwick. Illumination in BL Royal MS 15 E v.

The white saviour plot device goes back to at least the crusading romances which emerged in the late twelfth-century. In just one of them, the legendary English knight Guy of Warwick (or Gui de Warewic as he was called in the original Anglo-Norman poem) saved the Christian kingdom of Constantinople from a Saracen army (the real crusaders sacked it).

This is where some white savior narratives might end. But Guy’s story goes on, just like Daenerys’ does once she’s freed the people of Slavers Bay. Guy defeats a dragon and a giant, gaining power in the Middle East before returning home to England to save the nation from invaders from the north (Vikings) and found a dynasty. He begins life as an archetypal ‘squire of low degree,’ unable to win his lady or have any real power in England, but gains both through his adventures overseas.

Is this sounding familiar? Daenerys hasn’t actually saved Westeros from the white walkers (yet), but in the latest episode we found out that she’s literally sitting on top of a mountain of dragon-glass, the only weapon we know of that works against them. Her attention, like Guy’s in the medieval romance, was always focused on “home.” Everything else that happened, and everyone else they encountered on the way, is a tool for getting back there and accumulating power.

I’m not suggesting that Daenerys is deliberately modelled on Guy of Warwick or any other specific medieval figure fictional or historical. The point is that western culture has seen “Other” places and people as a source of power to be used for its own ends for centuries—in the case of Guy, going on a millennium. That perspective is what underpinned European colonisation and imperialism for centuries, with devastating effects that are still ongoing around the globe.

Game of Thrones and Martin’s novels aren’t aberrations, they reflect a way of thinking about the world that centres on Europe and Europeans and sees Others as either tools to serve the needs of a white person and their power, or irrelevant. It’s a way of thinking that is at least as old as the Middle Ages. Game of Thrones has racism problems because the world has racism problems.

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Content and Spoiler Warning: The below article contains both spoilers for Season 5, Episode 6 of Game of Thrones as well as frank discussions of rape and sexual violence.

Editor’s Note: This article is significantly longer than usual for The Public Medievalist. I did this because the topic is a very difficult one, and there are a lot of issues explored here that demand a longer form to even scratch the surface. Thanks also to Amy Kaufmann for reviewing this article and offering very helpful suggestions for revision.

Don’t believe it.

As a medievalist interested in popular culture, I’ve been asked by a handful of people to comment on thatscene from a recent episode of Game of Thrones (season 5, episode 6). If you saw it, you probably know which one I mean: Sansa Stark is married to Ramsay Bolton—the currently-reigning Worst Person in Westeros (a title always under fierce competition). Predictably—and horribly—he then rapes her on their wedding night. At this point in the show, Sansa is many things, but not so naive as she started out. It is heavily implied that she knew what she was getting herself into, but accepted this fate so that she can get closer to the targets of her vengeance. That doesn’t make it any less horrible though—and obviously does not in any way equal consent.

Since its airing, there has been considerable discussion on the internet about that scene; some accused it of being “gratuitous.” Considering that the show is one of the most popular depictions of the medievalesque in recent years, depicting marital rape in the show this raises a number of questions about the realities of sexual violence in medieval Europe.